Industry standards provide the necessary protocols and infrastructure that may be used for delivering digital television or DVD content with audio, video and data signals. These streams may be processed by various functions and operations within broadband networks, head-end and terminal devices such as set-top boxes (STB), and media devices such as DVD. These various functions and operations may for example involve access to sensitive areas of the device such as scan access, system buses and system interfaces and may benefit from some form of security or user authentication mechanism.
Various secure functions and operations may be protected by secure authentication mechanisms. Secure authentication operations for a class of electronic devices and for a specific application, usually require each device to authenticate for a single user. The device may be, for example, a set-top-box (STB) that may be implemented as a system on a chip (SOC). Applications, such as accessing system buses and interfaces, may be enabled by a user providing special information that may confirm his or her identity. The special information may be a password or may be a response to a challenge from the device.
Passwords are the most popular authentication mechanism. They make use of knowledge a user has. The user supplies a password and a device may validate it. If the password is verified to be associated with a user, the user's identity is authenticated. If not, the password is rejected and authentication fails.
For many applications, such as a secure download operation, a password may be discovered by an unauthorized user during an operation and may then be utilized for gaining access during subsequent operations of the same type.
In order to ensure secure communication, transmitted streams may need to be protected during transmission to devices such as STB. Upon receipt of the transmitted steams, one or more devices within the STB may need to provide secure access for the streams.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.